As I have said several times before, there is a spaceship search status table that gives an idea of what searches have been done. As I have also said several times, period-10 (the minimum period for these ships) is too high to reliably search at, especially for fast ships.

There aren't many small ships of higher periods (notable exceptions are loafer, copperhead/fireship, and weekender). Most high-period (i.e. 5+) spaceship technology is either contained in jslife or in this update that I made to the moving section. It's mostly missing a large number of 2c/6 ships, which can be found in various places in the spaceship discussion thread (this thread).

It was found using a pre-release version of qfind (my new program) that has been running for several weeks. Unfortunately, that version lacked the save state feature, so I don't have any partials to analyze. This is the second ship found by this search. The first one was the small ship posted here.

Edit 4: Here's another ship that was found by completing a gutter partial with a non-gutter search:

muzik wrote:How would one search for such patterns with speeds of below c but above c/2?

As gmc_nxtman suggested, one might start by asking the question on a different thread, maybe with a few more specifics about what exactly this strange creature is that you would be looking for. A c/2<speed<c pattern might be some kind of infinite-width or torus-bounded sub-superstring, or it might be a signal traveling through some not-yet-known wire or agar, but it ain't going to be a B3/S23 spaceship.

We do already have examples of 2c/3 diagonal signals in wires, and 2c/3 cross-grain orthogonal signals in zebra-stripes agar. So even though sub-light-speed travel above c/2 seems kind of strange and unnatural, as if the rules of Conway's Life should forbid it somehow, there are clearly ways to bend the rules -- no doubt including ways we haven't thought of yet.

Unfortunately it's a hard job searching for cases where an agar magically regenerates itself behind a signal. For any given agar it's very difficult to prove that it could never possibly happen -- and there are an unlimited number of increasingly complex agars.

But as the agar gets more complex, a hypothetical signal traveling through it needs a higher period. Pretty soon we hit the point where, if we had a tool that could find something like that, it could probably find a lot of other improbable things a lot more easily... c/11 or c/13 or c/18 spaceships, or p19 oscillators, or what have you.

muzik wrote:How would one search for such patterns with speeds of below c but above c/2?

As gmc_nxtman suggested, one might start by asking the question on a different thread, maybe with a few more specifics about what exactly this strange creature is that you would be looking for. A c/2<speed<c pattern might be some kind of infinite-width or torus-bounded sub-superstring, or it might be a signal traveling through some not-yet-known wire or agar, but it ain't going to be a B3/S23 spaceship.

Briefly, because it is off-topic, the best way of doing this is with the toroidal boundary conditions provided by JLS or wls-nb and using techniques similar to finding agar crawlers or other faster than c/2 signals.______

Inspired by a question on the 2xN spaceship thread, here is a width 3 partial for a 4c/12 ship [Edit: actually, 3c/12 (c/4)]. It doesn't extend any further but it hints at the possibility for a 3xN ship which could be found with existing search tools.

Saying about existing search tools, Tim Coe's search methodology may be the most suitable.

David Eppstein, in Searching for Spaceships, wrote:Coe’s search program knight uses a similar state space formed by sequences of pattern rows, but only uses the rows from a single phase of the spaceship. In place of our equation (∗), he evolves subsequences of 2p + 1 rows for p generations and tests that the middle row of the result matches the corresponding row of the subsequence.

Coe’s approach has some advantages; for instance, it can find patterns in which some phases exceed thebasic search width (as occurred in the Snail).

Last edited by Bullet51 on July 14th, 2017, 1:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.